Is this meant to disincentivize downvoting, or is that accidental? Pinning a monetary value to votes makes me feel like downvoting unclear, inaccurate, or off-topic content is literally taking money away from someone.
And, half-jokingly: If a post gets a net negative number of votes, it implies that the author would be expected to pay the site.
Incurring debt for negative votes is a hilarious image: “Fool! Your muddled, meandering post has damaged our community’s norm of high-quality discussion and polluted the precious epistemic commons of the LessWrong front page—now you must PAY for your transgression!!!”
It is funny from the perspective of a member of the clique, because if someone tries that kind of thing against a clique member, their friends can retaliate. It is deeply un-funny to an outsider, who can expect no such safety net. Humor is situational, and often extremely revealing about peoples’ underlying assumptions.
Well, but in fact people don’t incur debt for negative votes, so there is no such clique. I feel like you’re saying “this joke is funny from the perspective of some of the people in the joke and not funny from the perspective of others of them”? And I feel like that might be true, but it doesn’t feel super relevant to whether the joke is funny outside of the joke?
My own reply to TLW would be something like: yes, if that happened it would have that effect, and that would be bad. And also, it’s a pretty funny-to-me idea! Putting those two sentences next to each other suggests there’s some relation between them, like your intent was to say “it’s not funny because if it was true, a clique of users...”. But that’s not how humor works in my brain, at least, and I’d be kinda surprised if it worked that way in yours.
Is this meant to disincentivize downvoting, or is that accidental? Pinning a monetary value to votes makes me feel like downvoting unclear, inaccurate, or off-topic content is literally taking money away from someone.
And, half-jokingly: If a post gets a net negative number of votes, it implies that the author would be expected to pay the site.
Incurring debt for negative votes is a hilarious image: “Fool! Your muddled, meandering post has damaged our community’s norm of high-quality discussion and polluted the precious epistemic commons of the LessWrong front page—now you must PAY for your transgression!!!”
It really isn’t funny in the slightest.
It means a clique of users can ostracize someone with real-world consequences.
It is funny from the perspective of a member of the clique, because if someone tries that kind of thing against a clique member, their friends can retaliate. It is deeply un-funny to an outsider, who can expect no such safety net. Humor is situational, and often extremely revealing about peoples’ underlying assumptions.
Well, but in fact people don’t incur debt for negative votes, so there is no such clique. I feel like you’re saying “this joke is funny from the perspective of some of the people in the joke and not funny from the perspective of others of them”? And I feel like that might be true, but it doesn’t feel super relevant to whether the joke is funny outside of the joke?
My own reply to TLW would be something like: yes, if that happened it would have that effect, and that would be bad. And also, it’s a pretty funny-to-me idea! Putting those two sentences next to each other suggests there’s some relation between them, like your intent was to say “it’s not funny because if it was true, a clique of users...”. But that’s not how humor works in my brain, at least, and I’d be kinda surprised if it worked that way in yours.
I was more thinking of “people who have a current positive balance can have said balance wiped” than I was actual debt, to be clear.